Intelligent Agent-Based Assessment of a Resilient Multi-hop Routing Protocol for Dynamic WSN

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) constitute a current field of interest in which the major concerns are related to mobility, spatial distribution, connectivity and dynamic creation of networks between autonomous nodes for cooperative detection and data transfer in diverse areas (e.g., healthcare, environmental or industrial monitoring). To this end, the present work describes the theoretical and practical development of a communication protocol for WSNs based on Bluetooth. The interaction between mobile nodes is performed with a multi-hop scheme in response to traffic needs without requiring a scatternet formation procedure. The interest of this algorithm—based on the concept of routing vector—is that it was designed to withstand changes in the node distribution for high-mobility scenarios, thus allowing the implementation of a robust data routing in low-resource microcontrolled devices with no operability loss. As the main contribution, we present the hardware and software implementation of the communication protocol in real devices along several case studies. With this aim, a long-term experimentation in a dense scenario has been carried out through an intelligent agent-based approach to formally validate the protocol considering three different performance metrics: packet delivery ratio, feedback overhead and round-trip time.